Vitis Vinifera
by EXNativo
Summary: Dying is all a part of life. Being reborn probably isn't. Being reborn in a world of Quirks with nothing but the broken family of a hated character and the balls on my head is certainly out of the norm. But hey, it's a living. SI-OC as Mineta. Crackish.
1. Chapter 1

"...I don't know what you want me to say right now."

The inky blackness around me didn't see fit to reply. It never did. This place, that I'd managed to stumble into after a particularly bad day of being alive, had absolutely no character. In case you were wondering, that also included a voice.

Maybe there should have been a pearly gate. Maybe there should have been brimstone and hellfire. Maybe I shouldn't have walked through that alley in the dead of night looking for a shortcut. Maybe I shouldn't have seen too much. Maybe I shouldn't have tried to swim while wearing cement shoes.

Life is full of maybes. Death, as I've come to understand, is almost utterly devoid of them.

Sure, there was a void of nothingness surrounding me, so absolute and desolate that I sometimes had to wonder if I even had eyes anymore. But every now and then I would come across… something. I would never be able to fully understand what they were, beyond a colour that almost matched something that I'd seen before, and a shape that could have contained millions of edges, for all I could tell.

My first interaction with them had been as soon as I'd become aware of my surroundings. I would have said opened my eyes, but once again, I'd have to question myself. Whatever it had been, it'd been the only thing I've ever seen here have any sort of momentum other than myself. It would have slammed into me, directly over my heart, had the cement shoes not somehow followed me through the grave and dragged me down.

I was still on a downwards trend, movement-wise. I'd not managed to remove them, or really bend my body far enough to try. The full scope of my abilities seemed to stop at indistinct wriggling, which had somehow been enough so far for me to avoid the shapes and colours.

Maybe it was paranoia speaking, but there was a horrible feeling in my gut that something, anything would go terribly wrong if one of them touched me.

I hung my maybe-head in the silence. There wasn't much of anything I could do, beyond try to sleep, maybe even move on.

A glint caught my maybe-eye in the darkness. It was a fair ways away, closing the distance rapidly from beneath me. It had a circular shape, far more distinct than anything else I'd ever seen here.

I wouldn't be able to move out of the way in time for this one, not when it was matching my trajectory almost perfectly. It was rushing up to meet me, aimed at my face in a way that would only have been possible in a place of seemingly infinite room and possibility.

 _Oh well,_ I thought, as the ball punched into my nose and finally arrested my momentum, _at least I like purple._

 **XxX**

I woke up crying.

As far as I could tell, there wasn't really any good reason for this. My chest didn't hurt any, even though I'd taken what basically amounted to a cannonball to the heart. I wasn't all that sad about leaving that place behind, but I didn't think I was happy enough to weep in joy.

Come to think of it, it sounded higher pitched than I could remember. Not that I'd cried to this degree in quite some time, but it sounded… young. Infantile, even.

"Congratulations!" I heard someone above me say, his voice low and warm. I tried to stop crying, because who was this asshole to mock me like that, but the suddenness of his words only made me cry harder. "It's a boy!"

It's a what now?

Still sobbing uncontrollably, I tried to open my eyes. It may as well have been the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life, my muscles felt like putty and my eyelids may as well have been stitched together for all the progress it felt like I wasn't making.

Even so,one eye slowly cracked open. The lights surrounding me burned my retinas, but there was no chance I could stop now. The other eye followed, and I blinked a few times to get me back into the habit and clear the dots from my vision a little. The tears still streaming down my cheeks didn't help any in that regard.

A woman's face smiled down at me, tired and stressed and perhaps the happiest I'd ever seen another human being look. There was something strange about her, something a bit off, but that didn't stop the compulsion to reach out and touch her dimples.

Except my arm wasn't long enough. That definitely wasn't right, this woman's face was so close, I should have been able to reach it three times over.

That's when I actually saw my arm. My stubby, chubby, definitely little baby arm.

The cry died in my throat as I took it in. It was… tiny.

 _I_ was tiny.

Oh please no, I didn't sign up for this! Take me back!

The woman, who was apparently my new mother, nodded down to me, her eyes crinkling at the edges. It was a nice expression, strangely harmonic with the way her spherical hair bobbed with the movement- _what the fuck?_

"My little baby boy, we'll call you Minoru." She coed down at me, cuddling me close even as my blood ran cold. So, surely she couldn't have said what I think she said. I was just confused and hearing things incorrectly, that must be it-

"Mineta Minoru."

" ** _NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO_** ," I tried to scream.

"WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!" is what came out instead.

 **XxX**

Being a baby is just a constant cycle of sleeping, eating, and shitting your pants. Aside from that last one, I was all about this brand new stage in life.

As you might suspect, this didn't give me much agency to do anything for the time being. I wasn't old enough to walk yet, and talking led to me babbling an incoherent mess that would tumble out of my mouth until I used up the tiny amount of energy I had and fell asleep again.

Being a baby was exhausting. As you can likely imagine, it was also more than a little brain-numbingly boring.

I wasn't old enough to justify parking my ass in front of the television for hours on end. My cardboard limbs couldn't move me around enough for any joy to be taken out of exercise. Hell, I couldn't even hold a conversation, what chance in hell did I have of holding a book?

All I had were my hours upon hours of dreams, and my own thoughts. Those weren't much help on the matter either.

The dreams were all fairly stock standard. I would be lying if I said I wasn't hoping to get something, anything out of them. Maybe some hint of how I'd really gotten here or where I'd come from, but there was nothing. I highly doubted me escaping the zombie apocalypse on the back of a dragon made of ivy vines had anything to do with the matter.

My own thoughts were even more worthless.

I'd led another life, once upon a time. There were too many memories, too many precise locations, and a whole language worth of evidence to that fact. Sometimes I could understand what was being said around me, and what I couldn't decipher I could at least interpret as Japanese. My knowledge of the language was lacking to say the least, but hearing the tirades of 'baka' usually rallied against my new father by my new mother was at least a proof of concept.

Either I'd been reborn into a bilingual family, or my new parents were weebs the likes of which I'd never comprehended yet before.

Oh, and then there were the Quirks.

The Quirks were something that I felt should have been talked about a lot more than they actually were. My beta parents weren't all that spectacular; my father could secrete some sort of substance from his scalp that was more or less inescapable once it touched you, and my mother could pull off and regrow the spheres that her hair had become like it was nothing.

In a world with demigods of ice and fire… it was underwhelming, to say the least. Even so, that's who they were, and I…well, as nice as it would have been to be reborn a titan of unparalleled power, I liked them well enough.

...Okay, that was a bold-faced lie. My mother was a raging bitch and my father was a less than pathetic excuse of a man. In all the times I'd ever seen him throughout this new existence, he'd only ever raised his head when he was looking at me. Otherwise, his eyes would be glue to the ground so completely that one would have to wonder if his hair wasn't somehow involved.

I didn't see my mother all that much. She didn't hold a job, that much was apparent from all the noises that would come her her study whenever my father was away, and it usually took until the hunger got the better of me and I started bawling for her to feed me. With a bottle, thankfully.

I could count on one hand the amount of times she'd seen fit to clean up after me. I learned fairly quickly to hold out for as long as I could, hopefully until my father got home. The man at least had enough backbone to make sure I didn't die again in my crib before being cowed under his wife's seemingly never ending tirade.

It was a relief, really, when she finally walked out a few days after my first birthday.

 **XxX**

Walking and talking were privileges that I'd dearly missed.

Sometimes there was nothing more detrimental to your own mental health than yourself. Shit could happen in life; in my own experiences, it would happen more often than not. The breaks would get bigger and better if you did the right things, but for the most part, life would always find a way to fuck with you.

The biggest prank it could pull was turning your own thoughts against you, while making you do all the work. And damn if it wasn't very, _very_ good at it. Eventually, the crib bars would start to look like the missing fourth wall of a prison.

Freedom came to me too slowly. Yes, if I was actually some potato masquerading as a human being, my development would have have been astronomical in its pace. As a grown-ass man, I could only feel embarrassment and regret. I don't know the exact time frame; the days really began to blur together despite my best efforts, but I can tell you it was way too damn slow.

Walking came first. I'm not sure if that was how it typically was for toddlers, but I had reason to be cautious. While out and about, my new parents had usually spoken English, behind closed doors they would always switch back to Japanese. Yeah, turns out we were actually living in America all this time. Who knew? I certainly didn't.

While the immense capacity for a child to grow and learn meant I was picking up the language faster than I probably had any right to, I still had to be careful with what came out of my mouth.

I'd always been a quiet person by nature, so it wasn't very difficult.

I wish there was a bit more to be said about my early life, but that was more or less it. My days as a toddler were filled with learning a new language, figuring out how to function while my father was away and the babysitter was running late, and patiently waiting for my Quirk to manifest itself. That last one was what I was more looking forward to in this life, because really, I was a fucking baby.

What else was there to report on, the progress of my teething? You don't give a shit. Hell, I didn't give a shit, and I was living it. Being a child again is pointless, the sky is blue, and teeth are bastards of the highest degree.

Months passed, as they typically did, bringing my second birthday closer and closer. Daddy-o came and went, usually working late to support us and returning home only to bathe and sleep. I spent the precious time that I could have been bonding with him and building connections in this strange alien world by sneaking onto his computer whenever he left it at home and browsing the internet for as long as humanly possible. Some things never changed.

In doing so I learned a few very important things.

For starters, I'd found out where the purple-headed fuck had gotten his habits from. Mineta's dad, because no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make myself see him as anything other than a familiar stranger, had a lot of porn sites bookmarked. I'm saying that those url's were proudly displayed at the top of the screen. If the man couldn't punch out a boulder with his right hand then I would be amazed.

His name, as I had to find through snooping, is Mineta Katsushika. I'm not sure if that's significant in any way but it's something I learned, so now you can learn it too.

Also, the date was off. By about… three centuries, give or take a handful of years.

I'd always figured the future would be full of fancy shit, like flying cars and food in the form of little pills. Maybe media had ruined the world for me somewhat, but I was expecting some form of progression.

Instead, I got… the exact same world. Except my neighbour's fucking head was a pumpkin. Could have had space travel, but no, instead I get babysat by a cereal mascot whenever papa dearest is running late from work.

In between all the browsing, and maybe clicking on some of those bookmarks because I was _immensely_ curious about how Quirks had impacted the adult entertainment industry, I was also doing some other research.

See, Quirks were everywhere. Nearly every person had one, and the population had only managed to get bigger over the years. Even during all the new wars that had happened in between my midnight swim and now, the planet was now managing to hold upwards of ten billion people. Factoring in the mathematics when it came to Quirklessness, there had to have been somewhere within the realm of eight billion powers out there. Maybe they weren't unique and maybe the wouldn't ever be useful, but golly golly gosh, they fucking existed.

There were millions of people in my general area. According to the ads on the sides of the web pages, most of them were single, horny, Asian women. But surely, one of those single, horny, Asian women would have a Quirk that could help me out.

Because amazingly enough, when I grew up, I didn't want to be a three foot tall gremlin with an overbite and eyebrows that looked like they'd been inked on with a toothpick. No, I'd come from somewhere that I'd been relatively proud of, and I would go back even if I had to kick and scream and throw the biggest tantrum of my tiny life.

I'll do it. I'm fucking crazy.

And wouldn't you know it, halfway through the second week of my search, I got a hit.

 **XxX**

I spent the next month eating like a child possessed.

As gluttonous and ungrateful for my new life as that made me sound, I did actually have quite a good reason for it. Sure, it was selfish, and would likely hurt my new parents if either of them ever found out, which they absolutely would as soon as they lay eyes upon me, but… meh.

Hey, they made Mineta. Far as I was concerned, I was doing them a favour.

The meeting I'd managed to set up was only plausible for the sole purpose that I'd found literally exactly what I was looking for. I'm not sure if it was the result of a Quirk or just supremely advanced programming, but the man I'd managed to establish contact with was what some people could call a hacker. He'd been the middle-man; the receptionist, if you would. The guy he'd put me through to had only two instructions to give.

Bring what he'd asked for with me when the time came, and stock up on body fat. I wouldn't like the results if I failed to do either, apparently.

It had been the first instance of homework in this life. Finding a brand new identity to use was quite easy, seeing as I already had one waiting in the wings. It'd been centuries of violence and cold cases since then, nobody would notice if a new old face and name popped up again after all this time.

They wouldn't get the chance. I'd taken care to find a guy that could take care of that.

As for the eating, well. Apparently recoding the DNA a person had been born with took a significant amount of effort on both parts. I'd need mass more than anything else if I wanted to ensure I would ever crack four feet of height. Even now, I was abnormally small for my age.

Yeah, nah, fuck that. I prepared most of my own food anyway, by pure necessity, so nobody would really notice anything if I started going back for a few more helpings each time.

Over the course of four weeks, I'd managed to nearly triple my weight. The Mineta patriarch was beginning to get concerned for me, I could tell, but after tonight it wouldn't matter anyway.

The clock was just striking eight when I bundled up for the cold and tucked a folder full of printed papers under my arm. I was so pathetically tiny that they almost dragged on the ground in my wake. I didn't dare let go of them, though, not after all the work I had to go through to get them.

This folder contained my life. My _old_ life. The one I'd had before I ever came here, and the one I was determined to get another shot at.

The plan was fairly solid all around. I'd already explained most of all I needed and why I needed it on the phone, save for the fact that I'd apparently reincarnated. I still hadn't quite wrapped my head around that one myself, if I was being honest. I doubt I ever would.

Long story short, I'd compiled all I could find of my old life, scavenged from the ruins of social media that was now archaic. Medical records and tests would be on my new friends to take care of, and once everything was said and done, my old name and new appearance would be waiting in the wings to be used as an alias.

I'd decided to keep going on with Mineta Minoru. The name, that is, and also the Quirk. But absolutely nothing else. It was the least I could do in terms of birthrights, and Izuku was told to jump off a roof before he had his little superpower, so… yeah.

It occured to me, as I wandered into an alleyway much like the one I had died in the first time around, that I was effectively dooming all Mineta was and ever would be to a life of being nothing but a scapegoat that didn't technically exist. If I decided to go through with this, then whatever family he might have had, whatever achievements he might reach… whatever happiness he may have attained; all would be gone. In the blink of an eye.

Were my own childish, selfish desires really more important than one boy's life?

"Sup, fuckers?" I said as I hauled my fat ass through the first door on the left, taking a seat in the metal chair that had restraints and handing my file over to a dude wearing about three different pairs of gloves. "Let's do this shit."

They did this shit.

And nothing of value was lost.

 **XxX**

"We're going to move back to Tokyo."

Katsushika had his eyes on his plate, his fork moving mechanically between the meal I'd cooked and his mouth. The vegetables hadn't been cut properly and the meat was unevenly heated at best, but it was all I could really do with arms this short. Besides that, it'd only been a few days since my dramatic weight loss, and I didn't want to look at another fatty food for as long as I lived. It was either cook, or die of starvation because damn it I _refused_ to have fast food right now.

I pulled away the beanie concealing my sticky hair, the fabric sliding away with little obstruction. The balls on my head mostly stayed where they were; they jolted with the movement and one came free, but that was more or less it.

See, the effectiveness of Mineta's Quirk depended on how he felt, that was something I'd gone into this already knowing. The beanie was mostly to ensure that they didn't get in the way, especially after I'd figured out the trick to keeping them on my head and out of my clothing.

So, the better I felt, the stickier they became. Most of the time, the beanie would be effectively glued to my head. When I wanted to take it off, however, all I had to do was become horrifically depressed.

Usually I did this by reminding myself that I was born Mineta Minoru. It'd worked every time thus far.

I would still look like him for a while yet, unfortunately. The body still needed time to grow, after all.

"How come?" I asked in my broken, strangled Japanese. Katsushika glanced up for a moment, before sighing and letting his head drop once more.

"Your… your mother…" The man trailed off, outright refusing to meet my eyes again. That really didn't tell me all that much, all things considered. I couldn't remember all that much about my birth mother this time around, which if my past experience was anything to go by, probably meant the memories had been repressed or outright forgotten.

I had my doubts that you needed me to spell out why that was a bad thing.

"Cool." I shrugged, and struggled to force my teeth through the charcoal that had once been a piece of broccoli. _You_ try to accomplish anything when a solid 40% of your body weight is your head. "When do we leave?"

The first time around, I'd lived in Australia. It hadn't been amazing, but I'd survived up until a point. This United States was likely wildly different from what I could have expected in my own time, but there wasn't really anything keeping me here.

I mean sure, there was a favour that a group of people who very well may have been the Mafia could and would cash in at some point, but I could deal with that when it came to it. If you're wondering why they even had dealings with me, well, I am too. I won't bother questioning it though. What's done is done, and if they kill me, then that's probably fine too.

Katsushiki gave me a queer look. He did that a lot, during the brief times when he was actually around to make eye contact with me. I stared back at him blankly, chewing my broccoli and awaiting my answer.

Then I screamed in pain, because the broccoli broke my tooth.


	2. Chapter 2

It turned out that tooth had been loose anyway. Why it had shattered upon contact with something healthy was still up for debate, but my leading theory is that I'm just a really shit cook. That, or life was trying to reject me a second time, but that thought was far too edgy for a child that was defined by spheres. It was far more likely that the procedure I'd gone through to transform myself into someone I could be proud of had some adverse, unmentioned side effects.

Bastards.

After the excitement that was me bleeding all over the dinner table, I was given my timetable for packing and saying goodbye to whomever I'd grown close to, which was a resounding… three hours. Katsushika didn't seem to see a problem with this, seeing as all his personal effects together amounted to what he could fit in the pocket of his work uniform. The furniture would follow us over, he'd assured me, because I was so worried about losing my shitty, rickety bed, or the child sized desk that took up room I could be using in the corner.

I threw the clothes I cared about into a suitcase, shoved a few of the books I could comfortably read on top of them, and walked out of my tiny bedroom with both middle fingers in the air. It wasn't like the place was particularly bad; it'd actually served me quite well in my time there. I'd just always wanted to do that, and if there was ever an endorsement for following your dreams, it was dying with regrets.

Carpe la vida or whatever.

The shuttle to the airport arrived shortly after. I learned, as we sprinted out the door at speeds that had left kids home alone in the past, that three hours wasn't actually how much time we'd had to pack. It was how much time was left until the plane took off.

Katsushika had his talents, I'm sure, but the more I learned about him, the more I realised that competence just wasn't one of his strong points. The man had one suitcase on him, for fuck sakes, and he still managed to somehow spill the contents out on the street and waste our time.

It was filled with magazines. I'm sure you can guess what kind.

Go figure.

Also, the driver of the shuttle had a bubble for a head. Yeah. That was his superpower. It popped whenever he sneezed and a new one had to be blown through the stump of his neck. I have no idea if he can see during those times but it happened right when we were merging onto the interstate. Needless to say, my damn Quirk's going to go gray by the time I'm five if this shit keeps up.

Somehow, in spite of all preconceived notions of logic and physics, we were running with a comfortable schedule by the time we got to the airport. The pace we were setting made me wonder if we were being followed, sure, but even with my limited experience with planes, I knew that keeping things moving was typically the best bet.

We then proceeded to miss our flight, because one of the security guards got his hand stuck in Katsushika's hair.

You learn a lot about yourself when you watch your second father being dragged around by his shitty superpower, yowling like a cat and surrounded by muscle. For example, I learned that I no longer considered life to be worth it.

Finding the fork was the easy part. Getting past all the do-gooders to get to the power socket turned out to be significantly harder. I decided to give up before I made us miss the second plane.

The airport was a place of sadness. It was where families went to get torn apart, and be inconvenienced before they could get back together. If the food wasn't overpriced, it was dropped on the ground and forgotten about. You'd think in a futuristic, super powered world, there'd be a bit more to remark on.

I mean, I could tell the story about the time I ran into the same guy five time in the Tullamarine Airport, otherwise known as the second busiest in Australia, and somehow entered a conversation which ended with us declaring the other a low-effort, mutual stalker. I wouldn't, though, because that had happened in my first life and would thus be cheating.

Alright, so the airport was good for one thing. It reminded me that the Tullamarine guy had existed. He probably didn't anymore, due to the advancement of a few centuries, but he had at one point. I wonder if he had any descendants somewhere around the globe. I hope his life was fulfilling, he was a chill dude.

Rest in peace, Tullamarine dude.

But yeah, no, the airport fucking sucks. Finally getting on that plane was probably the happiest memory of this new life thus far.

...I just made myself really sad.

 **XxX**

The plane didn't end up being anything special. It was fairly run of the mill technology from the early 21st century. Yet another reminder of how much society had ironically stagnated after the emergence of Quirks, I suppose.

I'd opted to just sleep through the flight as best I could. Considering the amazing insomnia I'd had in my previous life, I knew better than to spit in the face of an opportunity like this. Knowing my luck, the fucking lack of sleep had followed me through hell itself and was lying in wait for the most inopportune moment to strike.

Shit, sorry, edge. I'm working on it, I promise.

Five minutes after take-off, the plane had stabilised enough for me to close my eyes. Fifteen minutes after that, I was well and truly out, barely realising that it was Katsushika's arm that I was snuggling into before I was well and truly out of it.

I awoke not very long after that, confused, bewildered, and more than a little annoyed at all the screaming. Someone had an iron grip on me, tight to the point that it was difficult to even move my arms, while someone else nearby was busy laughing their ass off.

My hand strayed up to my hair. My eyes were still close, resolutely trying to recapture the precious vestiges of sleep.

"We're going to be making an emergency stop, directly into the Eiffel Tower! Hahahahaha!"

Had I been any more awake than I was, I likely would have realise the situation I was in. Had I bothered to open my eyes, I would have seen the security guards that had been watching over us from aisle rows, slumped against various walls, seats, and passengers. Had I actually given myself time to think, I wouldn't have moved a muscle, and things would have been vastly different.

With what could almost be described as a flourish, I pulled one of the spheres away from my head and lazily flicked it in the direction of the laughter. I'd just wanted it to stop, because it was fucking irritating and cutting into my nap-time.

I heard the signature 'bo-yong' of my hair sticking to something, and nuzzled further into the arms around me with a smile as the laughter transformed abruptly into spluttering. Perhaps it'd attached to their body and surprised them, or maybe it had hit them in the face. I giggled at that thought as I drifted off again, completely ignorant of the drama happening around me.

I would only learn later, after I'd been carried off the plane for a stop-over to avoid being awoken once more, that my hair hadn't landed on someone. No, it had landed in someone, entering the supernaturally wide mouth of the criminal attempting to hijack the plane and sticking to the back of his throat with precision that could only have been the result of dumb fucking luck.

In a way, he was fortunate that he'd caught me at such a bad time. Because of the shitty, groggy mood I'd been in, the ball had only been overwhelmingly sticky for as long as it had taken for him to pass out from asphyxiation. It'd rolled out of his mouth almost as soon as his eyes had rolled to the back of his head.

Man was I glad to be a toddler so I could avoid all the inevitable jokes about having my balls in another man's mouth. Never would I have suspected such an advantage in this new life and you're already making them aren't you.

I was praised at the airport; I was such a small child with an impressive grasp on his Quirk, after all. To keep the adhesive to a non-fatal level in such a situation, Katsushika would brag to anybody willing to listen, would have taken control that should have been far beyond my years.

It didn't seem very prudent to inform him that it was happenstance, not when I was too busy counting my lucky stars. Being charged with murder at the ripe old age of two years old would have put a bit of a damper on the remaining years I had left. Or would it have been manslaughter, given the circumstances? It didn't really matter, either way I was glad to avoid something so damn inconvenient.

Oh, and I also didn't really feel like murdering anybody. At least not today. The moral implications would have indicated that the bastard would have deserved it, but I didn't even know the man's name or his reasons. Someone who had less to do with their time than me could debate the semantics of it, I wasn't particularly interested.

I closed my eyes and dreamed on the next flight.

 _I dreamed of a man with an odd face, and a Quirk that could put you to sleep if you acknowledge him. I dreamed of him leaving an entire plane comatose and taking the controls._

 _I dreamed of a final effort from an assortment of heroes. I dreamed of a man managing to board. I dreamed of all the children and some of the adults being taken away._

 _I dreamed of the plane being detonated, before it could kill thousands. I dreamed of not being able to say goodbye to Katsushika before it all happened._

 _I dreamed of rage, of depression, of apathy. I dreamed of losing myself to one vice after the other. I dreamed of nightmares, shadows and flames and men that came to drag me into the explosions._

 _I dreamed of becoming so hated that nobody would ever even care about all I had to say. Nobody would ever care about my experiences and my pain. I dreamed that I only ever made it worse, because that was all I knew how to do._

 _I dreamed of a soul that was not mine entering my body. I never woke up again._

 _But when I awoke in Tokyo, being carried off the flight by Katsushika, I didn't pay it any attention._

After all, it was just a stupid dream.

 _Right?_

 **XxX**

Katsushika wasted no time in making me feel unloved.

The man was a single father, I understood that. He was the second single working father that I'd had, in fact, and immensely luckier than the last one. At least now, while I was two years old, I could take care of myself and keep myself more or less alive. My teeth were getting progressively worse, but that was about the extent of the damage I'd done to myself.

Still, when he disappeared at sunrise the next morning, ducking into a car that was surely a bit out of his price-range, I could only really watch him go with a sigh. I didn't even know what the man did, but sometimes it kept him out of the house overnight, and typically had him returning while smelling of various chemicals.

Our new furniture, after the others had been thrown away, were higher end. The television was picking up more stations than ever. The changes to the house were rapid, and very noticeable. I had to wonder if Katsushika was cooking and selling meth.

That assumption wasn't helped any by the arrival of two people right after Katsushika and his shiny new stallion had fucked off into the sunset. One of them had a ridiculous combination of spiked up hair and tiny moustache, and the other looked like he hadn't slept in years. Teenagers, by the looks of it, definitely younger than I had been the first time around.

The blond one was jittery, his eyes noticeably shifting around behind his tiny sunglasses. The one with darker hair had bags under his eyes large enough to carry my groceries. There may as well have been a cautionary advertisement on the risks of drug abuse coming through my gate and towards my front door.

Well, it made sense. Katsushika had apparently raised Mineta, no doubt the man knew how to pick his prey.

Still, that left me with the unenviable task of telling them to fuck right off. Common sense would be to not open the door after convincing myself that they were high up on some shit, but as per usual, my overwhelming need to be an asshole in every presented situation won through.

Standing at less than two feet tall, sipping on a juice box I'd found in the fridge, and clad in fuzzy bunny slippers, I opened my front door when the blond dude raised a hand to knock. He almost stumbled in his enthusiasm, and I took the time to meet the blank stare the zombie gave me with one of my own.

"I don't know where Katsushika keeps the meth, sorry." I drained my juice box, tossing it over my shoulder towards the bin. Naturally, I missed. "Come back later."

The dark haired one quirked an eyebrow at me as I slammed the door shut. I couldn't help but feel that he was very familiar in that moment.

"Ne, Shota." I heard through the door as I was walking away. The voice was too full of life for it not to belong to the human personification of the Eiffel Tower, "does the kid we're supposed to be watching think we're on drugs?"

The other one sighed. I can tell you this because I'd frozen in place, thinking over that voice and the numerous times I'd heard it before.

"Just use the key, Yamada." the other one, presumably named Shota, groaned the words more than saying them. He sounded about as tired as his appearance would suggest. "Damn Minorus, all they are is trouble…"

"Hey, hey, careful! You'll make us lose our pay!"

Well. This was something.

 **XxX**

"That bumblefuck is a _chemist?_ "

"That's no way to talk about your father, Minoru-kun."

I waved Present Mic off, idly running my hand over Aizawa's scarf. He'd laid it down on the table once I'd made it obvious that I wanted to fiddle with it, and had claimed the largest couch we had as his to stretch out and doze on.

"Just call me Mineta." The scarf was sturdy, yet incredibly flexible. I jabbed it with my thumb, and decided that I wanted one exactly like it when it almost clamped around my finger. "And I watched Katsushiki fail at tying his shoes yesterday, twice. You sure he's not just the one who has to drink what the real scientists make and you're lying to make me feel better?"

Aizawa snorted. Beside me, Hizashi's head had fallen into his hands, but there was no mistaking the way his shoulders shook. At that point he'd given up even the pretense or professionalism.

"Yeah, he's so low on the ladder that he managed to get two soon-to-be Pro Heroes to watch his kid." Aizawa's eyes were closed, the only part of his body to even appear relaxed. He was still tense, arms braced against the couch as though he were about to leap out of his own skin and into action.

His tone hadn't changed any, but his stance and actual words knocked me out of the amusing daydream I'd been having of Katsushika lighting his own arm on fire while working with a bubbling beaker.

There was… something. Pieces to a puzzle that I'd only just realised had been laid out in front of me. Calling in two babysitters for a single kid was odd enough, and the fact that they both just so happened to be highly trained and in possession of Quirks and skill sets very well suited for, gee I don't know, hostage situations was more than a little suspect.

And here I was, right in the middle of it, with bars still on my bed and my legs barely capable of handling my own weight.

"Fucking perfect," I mumbled under my breath in English, ignoring the two stares I got in return as I cracked my neck to one side. "Did that moron leave you with any ground rules?"

"Who taught you these words?" Yamada asked me, his voice overlapping with and damn near drowning out Aizawa's lethargic grunt of, "no."

"Good." I pushed myself to my feet, and almost tipped over backwards when I came up. You try throwing your weight around when your head is a third of it and has the wind resistance of a lump of scotch tape. Ignoring my borderline drunken stumbling, I threw open one of the cupboards in the hallway, pulling out and flinging a pillow at Aizawa's downed form and missing by about half the room.

"I'm going back to sleep." I shot some finger guns at Yamada, clicking my tongue with each little wiggle of my hand. Despite my best efforts, his perplexed frown didn't abate. Drat, I would need to grow more powerful. "We're having take-out tonight 'cos I can't be fucked cooking. If you want any you'll need to have your own money."

We had pizza that night, after I'd scoured the internet for a place that would be open. Well, Eraserhead and I did. Present Mic was forced to cook for himself, because he'd left his wallet at home.

At least we had leftovers for the next day when both of them rocked up to my porch, a blanket draped over Aizawa's shoulders to flutter in the wind like a cape, and some sort of gaming console being cradled up against Yamada's chest like a child. They got inside the house with far fewer accusations of being addicted to illicit substances being levied against them this time, and thus began my weekend schedule for the foreseeable future.

 **XxX**

Nobody will even know just how precious time is until they realise they're wasting it.

Time was an interesting concept, though, because that's all it really was. A concept. It was as material as it was immaterial; the only way we could know it was there was by observing the aftereffects, yet humans and animals alike had figured out their own ways of documenting and understanding it.

It was every experience, good and bad, for every single being that would ever exist. It was finite, always running out, both spent and wasted and ultimately greater than all else.

I say this because, as is everything in the world, it's all a point of perspective.

If I could look at myself and see time being wasted, any other person who didn't know what I knew could look at me and see the complete opposite. I was still young, not even a child, and yet I could speak two languages like a native and had the rough maturity level of any late teen to early young adult.

Anyone else, those who _didn't_ know that I was a young adult in a toddler's body, would see me as something special. After all, to them, how could I be wasting time if I'd already managed this much at such a young age?

In terms of development, I was at an unfair advantage. All I needed to wait on was my physique. Everything else had followed me over and had been at least functional. The only exception to that was my teeth. Those fuckers were steadily getting worse, with even the newly grown canines I'd gotten the previous month showing the beginning signs of rotting away.

Even so, that wasn't something that myself or the dentist had managed to get to the bottom of, so for the time being I'd stopped thinking about it. No, with my freedom and lack of strict supervision that I probably would have gotten if I hadn't proven myself semi-competent at staying alive, I'd decided to put my other talents to good use.

Namely, writing.

Oddly enough, in a society dominated by superpowers that made anything possible, the supernatural genre was absolutely massive. Considering some of the shit I'd seen on the market whenever I cared to check, apparently most of those kinds of stories revolved around the idea of, 'there's probably a Quirk that can do that.'

Which, I mean, that's fair. There probably _is_. But that kind of story wasn't exactly inspired. I spent a couple of months looking into what was available, before giving up the ghost and deciding that following those footsteps was boring and I'd rather do literally anything else.

I had a computer, a competent understanding of the Japanese language, an unhealthy fixation on a nocturnal lifestyle, crippling insomnia (I _told_ you that the bastard was waiting!), and the drive to actually get off my ass and bring some of my imagination to life. Mixing all that together with the lax nature of half my babysitters left me with a bubbling concoction steeping in the back of my mind, leaking regret into the world around me and letting out a demented cackle whenever someone dipped a cup in to take a sip.

All of that came crashing down to Earth about half a year after the fact, when Katsushika walked through the front door like he owned the damn place and opened his big dumb stupid mouth.

I stared up at him, at his ridiculously hopeful smile and plastered hair and standard Japanese salaryman exhaustion, and I could do nothing but try to rehinge my jaw and pray that I'd heard completely and utterly wrong.

"...The fuck do you mean, daycare?"

Katsushika's smile widened, as though that was exactly what he wanted to hear. For all I knew, he'd been banking on this and had thus set out his entire strategy for this moment.

...Alright, no, that would be absurd.

"I think it's time for you to make some friends, Mine-kun."

"B-but I have Aizawa and Yamada!" I waved my arms as I protested, mainly to distract from the fact that while I'd had other people watching over me, I hadn't known any of them before the fact, and had thus completely forgotten their names.

Hell, I still slipped with Katsushiki's name from time to time, they weren't anything special.

Katsushika tugged on his tie, which he seemed to be inexplicably wearing over a lab coat. What the hell. "I meant people who are the same age as you."

"They are my age you fucking walnut," is what I almost said in the face of that. What actually came out, after I applied the mental brakes and almost thought all the way through my situation was, "Oh shit, that's right, I'm three."

Katsushika beamed down at me like I meant everything in the world to him.

I might have been tasting a combination of blood and bile in the back of my throat. I honestly wasn't sure if I was just being dramatic or not.

 **XxX**

Empathy is a learned concept.

There was the rare human that was born with a natural affinity for it. Children that could look at a situation and instinctively know exactly what had to be done. Some were forced to learn that earlier than most, and others simply never did.

Exceptions existed, just as they did in any other aspect of life. Izuku, for example, had always struck me as more of a combination of the first two. The boy would be suffering right now, at the hands of his best friend, and those experiences would already be working to push him on the path of receiving One For All. And there was really nothing special about Katsuki's behaviour, aside from the enabling and the fact that he could fucking explode at will. It would get less acceptable as he got older, but that was neither here nor there. Chances were I wouldn't have to worry about him any time soon.

They were both two sides of the same coin, working towards the same goal with vastly different approaches. Even the villains of the world were stuck in the cycle. Quirks did nothing but exaggerate what would already exist anyway.

Children would always be the purest form of humanity there would ever be. They were a fresh start, lacking anything but the most basic instinct. No respect, no fear, and no empathy.

I arrived at the daycare early the next morning, the arms of my babysitter feeling more like iron bars as they encased and prevented me from sprinting back outside and throwing myself underneath a passing car. I wasn't entirely sure who this one was; I'd never seen them before, and I think I would have remembered some dipshit that was dressed up like a washing machine.

I got through the introductions to the other kids, and promptly found a nice, quiet corner to claim as my own. A few kids came over to say hello, and after the second one got his hand stuck on my hair and started crying, I threw up my hands in defeat and began work on a blanket fort. Sue me, I'd not managed to sleep until three hours before some asshole was shaking me awake and forcing me to look at his embarrassment of a costume.

I'd had my eyes closed for about five minutes before the noises outside my shelter had gotten a bit too loud for me to nap through. I was all prepared to stick my head out and unleash a torrent of insults against a bunch of second level infants, when one simple sentence brought me up short.

"Why do you look so much like Sawtooth?"

Myself, along with my big adult brain that occasionally watched the news, both froze up. The name Sawtooth hadn't meant anything to me up until a couple of days ago, when I'd decided to get the full story from both the T.V and the internet purely because Yamada hadn't wanted me knowing about it.

Minashi Zetsubo had been his name, most news sources agreed on. Nobody had gotten a definite answer on what he did or why he did it, but on Saturday morning he'd walked into his workplace with a Quirk that had reportedly only ever given him slight facial and teeth deformities. He'd walked out an hour later, covered in blood, and had immediately attacked the nearest passerby with a blade that had grown out of his head.

The woman had managed to activate her Hypnosis Quirk in time to avoid what was most assuredly death. She'd be facing a slap on the wrist for a vigilantism charge, and Minashi would be spending the rest of his life in prison for the murder of thirty-seven and the partial cannibalism of four.

All in all, not a very nice or sane individual. Not the kind of man you wanted to be told you were emulating.

So with all the indignation of a tired man who was hearing some real dumb shit being spewed in his vicinity, I climbed out of my fluffy blanket fort, and marched towards the group of three that were taking up residence in my space.

I didn't bother taking in the situation beyond a very brief first glance. One kid was sitting against the wall, doing his best to ignore the two standing over him. It was such a classic bullying set-up that I almost wanted to crawl back into my fort in the interest of avoiding stereotyping.

Then the kid against the wall sniffled, and I gave up on any thoughts of being polite.

"Oi." I was taller than the two who were standing, I noticed with a small amount of satisfaction. Given a rough eyeball estimate, they were both standing higher than Mineta had been by the time he got to U.A. Pretty sad, for a bunch of kids who weren't even half a decade old.

Beanie abandoned in my fort, I pulled two of the spheres from my head, and thrust both hands out when the two kids turned around. They barely had time to sputter before my hair was stuck to their foreheads, and definitely weren't in any state of mind to retaliate as I spun them back around and shoved them towards the wall.

They hit the dry plaster with dull thuds. The silence in the moment before they realised their circumstances was golden.

The kid on the ground could only let out a surprised, "huh?" as I grabbed him by one of his six arms, and began to drag him towards the blanket fort. It was easily big enough for two people, large for our ages as we were, and I didn't trust him enough to not interrupt my sleep with his strife again.

And so, as two children began to cry in the background, I made my first friend.


	3. Chapter 3

I could feel my face contort around the fist that was buried into my cheek. The pathetic kick I'd been gearing up towards went wide, throwing my balance even further off as the masked man in front of me pushed me back into the mud.

The ground hit me, moreso than I hit it. I bounced along like a sack of bricks, rolling twice and losing a large majority of my hair in the tumble. I finally came to a rest halfway across the backyard, my own Quirk making a breadcrumb trail to mark just how tremendously that punch had stirred my shit.

My whole body was aching. I would have been surprised if all my bones were still in proper alignment.

"Get up."

And yet, in spite of that, I got up.

Hi there, my name is Minoru Mineta. It's not the only name I've ever been called, but that's not really important right now. I'm five years old, I live in Tokyo, and when the day is over, I'm probably going to require reconstructive surgery to my general facial area.

You're probably wondering how I got into this situation, right? Well, I could tell you the truth and say that it's all my fault, but accusing other people makes me feel better. So rest assured, my best friend is a fucking snitch.

* * *

 _"How did you get that bruise, Minoru?"_

 _Briefly, I entertained the idea of saying that I didn't have minced meat replacing three quarters of my face. It wouldn't be true by any stretch of the imagination, but there might have been someone out there dumb enough to believe it._

 _Unfortunately for me, Present Mic wasn't dumb. Dumb enough to want to spend more time in my presence, sure, but he was no Katsushika._

 _"I walked into a door," I said instead, pointedly turning my head so the fist shaped indent was less apparent._

 _Aizawa shifted on the couch. I knew I was fucked the minute he raised his head and actually took some level of interest in the conversation. I wanted to find somewhere else to look, I really did, but Eraserhead's glare wasn't something you could just ignore._

 _"I don't think any door could do that much damage." His voice was slow, and leveled. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say and way to say it. Too bad that sentence was coming from someone who could literally fucking kill a percentage of the population with a look._

 _"It was a very powerful door," I attempted._

 _It was at that moment Shouji decided to speak up._

 _I could see the little bastard out the corner of my eye. He looked around the room slowly, surveying everything that was on display. He looked at the massive T.V, then to the fridge that I knew was bursting with all sorts of delicious goodies, and finally at the computer terminal that I had slowly been building up to the best on this side of the planet._

 _All of this, I had offered to him, along with the hand of friendship. And now, after years of keeping my secrets and enjoying all I had to offer to him, he sighed and shook his head._

 _"Someone punched him yesterday."_

 _I gaped at his betrayal, spinning in a very exaggerated circle to hide the fact that I was trying to figure out which doorway to flee out of. Shouji met my stare with one of his own, all six of his arms crossed over his chest. Between his face and his stature, he was far more intimidating than any four-nearly-five year old had any right to be._

 _That wasn't to say I was afraid of him. Why should I have been?_

 _"I won the fight!" Shit, wait, that was probably the wrong thing to say. "No, wait, I've won EVERY fight!"_

 _FUCK. I'M BAD AT THIS._

 _Though to be fair, I had. So what if the little fucker had a Quirk that allowed him to transform dead skin cells on his knuckles into kinetic energy? It had been a single lucky hit, and it hadn't helped him when I'd trapped both his feet to the ground, bound both his hands together with a single glob of hair, and choked him out like the bitch he was. The best part was that it'd been right before nap time, so nobody had noticed anything after I'd retreated back into my blanket fort._

 _The teachers wouldn't have cared anyway, most likely. I'd found that in this day and age, the difference between schoolyard rough-housing and an unofficiated cage match was how many tables you choke-slammed your opposition through. The number fluctuated depending on the strengths of the Quirks involved, and considering mine had already taken down a supervillain intent on hijacking a plane, a blind eye would be turned fairly frequently._

 _It also helped that I only had one parent and he was very bad at remembering to attend any scheduled interviews. Almost as bad as I was at telling him about them, if I had to guess._

 _Shouji was too pure to smack around the people who badmouthed him, given that he had about thirty potential knuckles with which to bitchslap and the proportional strength of a baby rhinoceros. I wasn't. It didn't happen too often anymore, ever since I made it clear that I absolutely would be punching anybody that tried it, but every now and then we got someone who never got the memo. This one in particular had even thrown the first punch, so, you know, bonus._

 _You may be wondering why I'm spending my rebirth punching children in the face. Well, quite simply, talking children out of doing something when you had no authority over them was a pain in the ass to accomplish. Even then, when you considered the sort of shit that villains could and would pull during the day in the busiest sections of the city, this sort of thing was of minor consequence._

 _This time around, I would be going down swinging. Be it to some psychopath in an alleyway or some snot-nosed brat with only half a grip on… I dunno, laser beam eyes. Fucking hell, I hope I don't come across someone who can glare lasers and I end up having to punch them in the face, that sounds like it would hurt._

 _Speaking of hurt, all I'd lost in the brawl was a tooth. Which, at this point, big fucking whoop. He may have also punched the memory of his name out of my head, because I couldn't for the life of me remember what it had been._

 _A long scarf whipped around me as soon as I'd taken the first step toward the door. Aizawa hadn't activated his Quirk, not when the only person in the room it'd affect was Yamada, but he didn't need floating hair and glowing eyes to mean business._

 _"Does this happen often?" He said, voice barely above a whisper. He wasn't looking at me for an answer, though, his eyes had gone right past mine and were fixed on Shouji with an uncomfortable intensity._

 _I caught Shouji's eye with an intricate eyebrow dance, wriggling until my mouth was peeking out above the scarf I was still suspended in. Don't say a damn word, I mouthed desperately._

 _All was silent for a second._

 _Then a second mouth appeared on one of Shouji's left arms and answered for him._

 _"Yep."_

 _" **YOU SON OF A-** " _

_The scarf whipped back around my mouth. That connection was used more than any other as Aizawa dragged me into the backyard and towards my doom._

 _"Every fight, huh?" He mused quietly to himself, and I knew in that moment that even if I would survive the day, I would wish that I hadn't. "We'll see. Feel free to tell me to stop whenever, Minoru."_

 _I got one arm free on the journey out the door._

 _I ended up using it to flip Shouji off._

 _He didn't seem to care, the bastard._

* * *

Learning under Shota Aizawa was a privilege that very few people had. Well, I kind of had to assume, seeing as I'd not really felt like I'd learned anything. Still, it was an honour to have him kicking the shit out of me so early.

The man was a bit of an oddity in the hero community. Even if the people knew his name, they more than likely didn't have a face to go along with it. He worked in the dead of night, sacrificing his own well-being for that of the community. In a society of flash and pizzazz, he was a rare ray of pure altruism, and that altruism came from wanting to help people while also not having anything to do with them.

He was a different kind of hero. Most made the people feel safe; he was one of the few who could make them feel _inspired_. Some heroes were unable to do either, while some could very easily do both. Japan's current number two and number one heroes came to mind, respectively.

Even so, that wasn't what set him apart from a lot of professionals that I could think of. At this point, All Might could beat a genetically engineered supervillain with five punches. Endeavour was a good example of hell warming over. There were plenty of people, veterans and rising stars, that wielded Quirks of incredible power.

Eraserhead wasn't powerful. His Quirk was fucking ridiculous in today's day and age, but as a man he was quite thin. The constant sleep deprivation almost gave him an air of frailty. That couldn't have been further from the truth, but the guy just couldn't beat the shit out of a mountain.

What he did have, above so many others, was skill.

Aizawa operated alone. With the way his Quirk worked, that was the only option he really had. And yet he was still kicking, and would be kicking about a decade into the future to teach the next class of top heroes. Not bad for someone whose superpower was making those around him just as normal as he was.

Put quite simply, if you took superpowers out of the equation, Aizawa was _better_ than you. And oh hey, guess what, bitch?

So yeah, even if he was pulling his punches, after what felt like hours of getting my ass kicked up and down the fence line, that fact that I hadn't been reduced to a slowly spreading pool of blood and grape juice was a fucking surprise.

He'd said that I had the option to end it, but even after all this time, I still hadn't. Maybe it was some stupid form of masculine pride that kept me standing, but there was just too many open questions to my situation for me to go down.

Pro Heroes didn't babysit kids. Not for anyone, and not for free. Even if it wasn't money, Katsushika was throwing _something_ around to guarantee this sort of protection for me, and laying down to accept whatever the world threw at me wasn't going to get me answers.

One thing was certain, though. Aizawa _knew_. There was something here, anything that he was privy to, and it was bad enough for him to go a step further and offer me the option of defending _myself_. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, of course, and assuming that he _wasn't_ just beating the shit out of me because he felt like it. I liked that option, because it didn't nullify my entire spiel about Eraserhead being an inspiration to the general populace.

Then again, if we were to rewind by a few centuries, the general public would absolutely be behind Mineta being pulverised into a fine wine.

Why couldn't I have been reborn as something with a little more street cred, like a pigeon?

Finally, Aizawa straightened out of his stance, blowing a strand of hair out of his eyes as I swayed. Absently, I pulled a sphere from my bleeding scalp, slapping it against the tree beside me as I toppled sideways.

My hair caught my shirt and held me there, my feet barely underneath me for however long it would last. Even so, I was still standing, and I was still able to glare back at Aizawa, blinking away the blood that had been brought forth by my own Quirk.

That must have been what he was looking for. After a moment, he nodded, and I felt six arms wrap around me right as my hair gave way and I started to slip.

"You still suck," I whispered, and Shouji hoisted me up into his arms. Four fucking years old and he could already manhandle me, some people got all the damn luck with their genetics.

"My training was far more intense than this."

I felt my noble steed tense underneath me, and manoeuvred my poor, punished body into laying a hand against his shoulder and shaking my head. Oh ye of little faith and few words, if Aizawa wasn't done pushing my shit in, he wouldn't have stopped.

And I couldn't help but feel that he was telling the truth, too. Now that I had a moment, a moment where I could just breathe and calm myself down and actually think, I was starting to realise things that had been lost on me in the hectic barrage of movement that I'd been subjected to.

Most of the pain I was feeling right now was something I'd done to myself. I say most, because I hadn't been the one punching me in the face, but I could only recall three instances of that happening. The burning in my limbs, the cuts that were too small to even bleed, the blood flowing freely from my scalp; all of it had been due to my clumsiness. My own movements and abuse of reflexes that I didn't actually have.

It was an enlightening experience, if nothing else. Even after close to half a decade, I was still trying to move as though I was over six feet tall, with limbs at least two and a half times longer than they were now.

Or it was the concussion that resulted from the first punch to the face. I don't know, I'm not a doctor.

"My sensei knew I wanted to be a hero. He knew that I had my advantages and disadvantages. The world is a dangerous place to live in." He reached behind him, to somewhere I couldn't see, and handed me a comically large bottle. I would have laughed at the thing if I wasn't in amazing amounts of pain.

Still, wrapped up in Shouji's arms, with a bottle roughly half my size lying on my chest, brought forth unwanted images of Mineta's hero costume.

Aizawa must have ignored my choked sputtering that was attempting to convey humour, poking me on the forehead until he had my attention back. "It's my job to keep you safe, and that'll stay my job until you're old enough to look after yourself."

"Is this what you call looking after him?" A mouth on Shouji's middle right arm snapped. His face hadn't moved from the severe frown that honestly would have scared any other kid away.

"There are kids who can't control their Quirks," Aizawa responded, his voice losing any emotion that it may have had. "There are _people_ who _won't_."

Shouji's arms tightened around me. If I wasn't on my way to becoming a giant bruise, I would have appreciated it. As it was, I could barely keep my eyes open, and I was rapidly running out of reasons to try.

"I'm not forcing anything on you, Mineta. You're still conscious after half an hour, so you passed my test." Aizawa rubbed his eyes, giving me a second to question everything I knew about the universe. That had been half an hour? I'd thought we'd been out here for half the damn day! "If you don't want me training you, then you'll have to tell me right now. Otherwise, you know what I'll be expecting from you."

It was an unfair choice to ask of a child, especially one with such minimal parental supervision. Thankfully, I was no child, even if I went to a preschool and got into fights like one.

"What would you have done if he hadn't lasted?" Shouji's quiet voice was a more welcome relief than I'd been expecting. He'd even used his actual mouth for it; none of his arms had transformed in that moment.

"Tried again some other time." Well, that confirmed _that_ theory, at least. There was definitely something going on if Aizawa was going to be _this_ persistent. As far as I could recall, he didn't usually bother with people who had no potential.

How much was he being paid? _Was_ he being paid?

Just what was going on here?

I tried to shift in Shouji's arms, but gave up when it became obvious that I would just end up embarrassing myself if I tried any longer. There were some battles that you just couldn't win, no matter how hard you tried.

Still, the man was waiting for an answer, and it would be rude to leave him hanging.

"...Where's Yamada?" Do I even need to explain my reasoning?

"He's-"

 _That's_ when I finally fell unconscious. Because, you know, fucking _ow_.

 **XxX**

"YOU _WHAT!?_ "

It was Present Mic's elevated voice that snapped me out of my nap.

There was a strangled cry on my lips as I sat bolt upright, yanking a sphere of my hair out so fast that it may as well have materialised in my hand. The room I found myself in was only somewhat familiar, and it was my reflexes that sent the hair flying before my brain had any semblance of a chance to catch up.

It was only then, after I'd taken the time to blink and snapped myself out of my PTSD - Post Terrifying Shouta Disorder - that I came face-to-hair with the person that had been moving towards me.

 _"He's five years old, Shouta, don't give me crap about him agreeing to anything-!"_

To the tune of Present Mic's fading but still clearly audible voice, my hair slowly peeled away before my eyes, revealing the sinister features of my new best friend.

Already, I could see the glimpses of the fearsome hero he would no doubt grow to be in his glare. There was intelligence in those eyes that shouldn't have been there yet, the tension in his jaw far too pronounced for an age that should have had a far more emotional response.

He was upset. It was easy enough for me to see, because I knew what to look for. I had my doubts that Shouji had ever been loud in his life, and being bullied wouldn't turn that around.

And can I just say, for a society that's so diverse due to repeated genetic anomalies, having such a stigma against something that merely appeared villainous was fucking stupid? I mean, I doubt I would really have to convince anyone of even adequate intelligence and empathy, but kids were psychopaths and I knew at least one adult that was a complete fucking idiot, so maybe it was just my unique circumstances of being both at once that let me see through the shroud.

There was a case to be made for an outsider looking in, and there was an even stronger case to be made for common sense. Contempt would only ever breed contempt, and humanity would never truly stop being at odds with itself, but that didn't change the fact that you had to really push the boundaries of what stupidity could reach when superpowers were the norm.

It wasn't just kids that gave Shouji a wide berth in the street. Adults, from those who'd just gotten out of high school to the elderly, would always stare with a suspicious gleam in their eye. As though they were waiting for him to turn around and pick their pocket whenever we walked past.

I didn't tend to miss the looks. Shouji, with all the extra senses he could grow from his limbs, didn't either.

It was, in all honesty, kind of pathetic. It was sad to realise that this is where the world had led to, forced into a society that was so scared of their ingrained talents that they saw nothing wrong with shunning a child just because of his appearance. Not that I should dare say anything out loud; maybe this supposedly-advanced future I'd reincarnated into still had some stakes lying around to burn me on for a refusal to conform.

I could only assume that I was walking on the ashes of all those who hadn't glared at a child just because everyone else was.

Yes, the exaggeration is very apparent to me. Pardon my poor manners in the face of the abuse of my best friend. No fucking wonder a quarter of his bottom drawer was already filled with different sorts of masks.

"We should tell your dad."

My thoughts of an unjust and ridiculous society was pulled up short at that sentence, and I didn't even bother trying to hide my derisive snort for what it was.

"What's the point?" Katsushika had yet to actually do anything in my presence that proved he was capable of anything more complex than base emotions. All the interest he'd shown in my life since we got to Tokyo started and ended at the front door. The dude could have been smart, he may have even been a genius if what I was told was the absolute truth, but there was just something about the man that made him unapproachable. Rigid in ways that shouldn't have been so natural. "It's not like he's ever around."

Shouji leaned forward in his seat, the movement shifting the octopus plush doll that I was just now realising he had sitting in his lap. It was a ridiculous looking toy, garishly pink and more smile than anything else, but the way he was clinging to it with three arms didn't escape my notice.

"Then we should tell my parents."

I shook my head at that. I'd yet to actually even meet Shouji's parents, and all I knew about them was that they both had jobs that kept them away from home much of the time. The only impression they had of me, which was only what Shouji had made me aware of, was that they were impressed with my bilinguality.

Which I kind of cheated to get, when you think about it, so… yeah.

"Tell them what? That my babysitter is making me learn how to defend myself?" Technically, I'd had a choice, but the lines surrounding that decision were so thin that even a blind man would have been able to read between them. Shouji could very easily choose to have more eyes than I did, and I _knew_ he wasn't an idiot. "There's no point."

The frown deepened on his face, and for a moment I was worried that this was about to escalate into a shouting match. His arms tightened around his doll; he took a deep, shuddering breath-

And then he relaxed, his arms falling limp around his toy and his frown transferring up to his eyes.

"Kay."

I didn't really know all that much about Shouji. I might have skipped over any honourifics for his name, but that was mainly because I couldn't be bothered actually adding them. The few times he addressed me by name, he hadn't bothered with it either, which I could only take to mean he was fine with it.

Even if he was a stranger, the signs of someone who was used to giving up were plain to see. It was a familiar look, one that I was used to seeing in the mirror over the course of about twenty-six years.

People, myself included, liked to espouse on the durability of children. It was very true; children were hardier than a lot of people would ever give them credit for. It wasn't really a secret that the human condition deteriorated with age, so it would make sense that the younger someone was, the more they would be able to put up with.

The real damage was in pushing that limit.

Breaking limits was all well and good in a shounen beam power struggle. The same could not be said for how much a person could take. A four year old, giving up that easily with no compromise?

Disgust curled in my gut again. Maybe the villains had a point about the world having a lot to answer for. Debating something like that could wait until until I wasn't five years old, with a best friend rapidly withdrawing right before my eyes.

"I don't know exactly what's happening." That was the truth, I had no clue. Eraserhead was a pretty big name to be taking off the streets. Add in Present Mic, and the need for a babysitter very easily transformed into protection detail. I wasn't planning on being idle with the investigation that would be launched.

...I didn't really know how that investigation would be launched, but I'd cross that bridge when I got to it, and then probably burn it behind me out of spite.

"As soon as I figure it out…" I reached a hand out, a difficult task once the still-present aches were brought into account, and carefully settled it on Shouji's closest shoulder, "I'll make sure to tell you. OK?"

He stared at me, his only visible eye flinty, but he didn't shy away from me. Creating distance was a common habit for those who had suffered abuse, and the fact that he hadn't done that was a monumentally good thing.

"Promise?" His voice was low, barely above a whisper, but I don't think I was imagining the undeniable power behind it. Definitely a future hero, of that I had no doubts.

The smile came to me easily as I raised my other hand, pinky outstretched.

Sure, it was a childish gesture.

Your point?

 **XxX**

"Hi, dad."

Katsushika stared at me from the doorway, one foot still raised slightly above the carpet. My request to stay at Shouji's for the night had been rejected by his parents, and despite the fact that Yamada had taken Shota somewhere to yell at him, we'd still managed to beat my estranged chemist of a family member home.

His face contorted into a grimace, his narrowed gaze settled somewhere behind my left ear.

"Hello- Mu...m-m-miii...Mineta!" With a bright grin, Katsushika walked forward to clap me on the shoulder, pausing to glance into the pot that I was bringing to boil. "Smells great, son! How was school today?"

I watched him as he turned on his heel and walked out, giving no indication that he was expecting an answer. With a sigh, I set the thyme down beside the pot. I hated the taste of it on most foods, but that fact that Katsushika loved it was one of the few things I knew about the man.

It felt too heavy a burden to carry as I murmured into the empty room.

"It's Sunday, you dumbass."


	4. Chapter 4

**Yes, been a while. Unfortunately, I have a life and other interests.**

* * *

Had someone asked me where I saw myself being during my early school days, I would have answered, "Stuck to a tree with an amazingly itchy nose. Also, how did you get in my house?"

The someone in question would have assumed I was joking. Little did that know that I had exhausted all the balls of hair I could grow, and was currently stuck to a tree by the back of my shirt while my scalp bled and my nose itched like a motherfucker.

Why was I stuck to a tree? Geez dude, maybe I wanted to be stuck to a tree. Get off my fucking case.

Nah, I'm just kidding. The training day had ended and my babysitters had gone back to wherever they crawled back to when I wasn't around to brighten up their lives, and I was curious enough about how long my hair could hold me up in my current state to check.

That had been half an hour ago. I didn't know which was more impressive, the fact that I was still hanging here or the fact that I'd somehow managed to stick both my sleeves to the tree as well.

My nose tingled again. It was getting very difficult to ignore.

"Ugh, damn it. Shouji, couldja get that for me please?"

My good old buddy old friend old pal pretty much entirely ignored me, flicking the page of his book over. The page of the book that _I'd_ written and published, and he was enjoying very much. You'd think that would be enough to get me out of the tree, so I could maybe write a little bit more, but noooo.

My bestest friend in the whole wide world glanced up at me with a single eye, and then proceeded to snuggled further into the hammock. _My_ hammock, that I'd set up for _myself_. After I got off this fucking tree and _scratched my fucking nose WHY DID I GO THROUGH WITH THIS STUPID FUCKING-_

"You really should stop overusing your Quirk."

That dry, matter-of-fact tone instantly managed to grate against my nerves. Shouji was a great friend and I wouldn't trade him for anything, but I also could not wait for him to grow up a little and start making his own decisions in life.

"You really should start overusing yours." I would have crossed my arms. If I could. "How else are we supposed to develop them?"

Shouji turned the page again, eyes scanning the page at a lazy pace. For almost a full minute, I was convinced he was ignoring me.

"I don't have a psychotic zombie to force me to go faster than my own pace." I opened my mouth to defend Aizawa's honour, and then immediately closed it. Yeah, no, that was fair. "I'm also not the one currently bleeding."

"Ah, it's only a little bit of blood." I tilted my head to the side, accidentally pulling more hair out and thus opening more of my scalp. Cursing under my breath, I glanced back over at Shouji, taking in his relaxed posture and scoffing a little bit despite myself.

"Says the one that wants to be a hero…" I grumbled, trying fruitlessly to rotate my shoulder. Just a little bit, I only needed it for a second, come on baby…!

"...How did you know I wanted to be a hero?"

I froze, nose blessedly forgotten for a moment. _Oh, right, he's never said that to me before. Whoops._

"Everyone wants to be a hero, Shouji. Basic human nature." My left arm slipped. Just for a moment, hardly even an inch, but I felt it. With a quick, sharp tug, I was a quarter of the way free, and almost forgot to finish my sentence in the ensuing bliss. "Some people are just more likely to succeed."

Shouji fell silent. The book was still held up to his face, but it was easy to see that he wasn't reading it. I gave him the time he needed as he sat there in thought, making quick work of the weakening adhesive now that I actually had a means of helping myself.

Within half a minute, I was unbound. My legs ached after being trapped in one position for so long, but I was able to make it back to the house, Shouji following idly behind me. Present Mic had been adamant about the importance of being inside before it got too dark today. He'd mentioned something about a man who could generate explosions and preyed on kids, but to be entirely honest I wasn't exactly paying attention.

I'd been a bit preoccupied with trying to stick myself to a tree.

Thankfully, everything was working well enough for me to gather what I needed. Tonight was Shouji's choice for dinner, and he'd requested squid ink pasta. It was a stroke of luck that I liked it too, considering how much of the stuff he could and would eat on a regular basis if I was willing to enable him.

I was halfway through making the sauce when Shouji finally spoke up once more, the book forgotten on the countertop beside him.

"You think I can do it?"

I almost stopped chopping when I heard the raw vulnerability in his voice, but I managed to keep my face straight. Shouji wouldn't appreciate sympathy, I'd already offered him that. I glanced over to him, and one of his hands fell away from his mask, not quite fast enough to hide what he'd been thinking.

The grin I shot him was easy. I always loved it when they were.

"If you start joining me when Aizawa comes by, sure."

Immediately, all six of his arms were crossed, and he was looking off to the side. "Not a chance."

That drew a laugh, first from me, with Shouji following a few moments later. The rest of the night passed without melancholy, even when I had to smack his hand away from uncooked pieces of squid.

 **XxX**

One of the best things about all of Aizawa's training was definitely how it could affect travelling.

Some people just walked. Some people jogged, others drove, and if they thought they could get away with it, some people with movement based Quirks would use them to get around.

But taking all that away, all the superpowers and technology that I wasn't even old enough to use, left me with one thing. My own body.

Eraserhead didn't maintain his mysterious rep by catching a bus whenever he had to jump over a few blocks. His training had been focused on my Quirk and fighting skills, that was true, but that didn't take into account anything I did on my own time, or how those skills could be transferred to other aspects of life and joy.

Back when I had been younger, dating all the way down to the 21st century, I'd always been enamoured with the idea of freerunning. Of taking the environment around me and making it my bitch. I'd never been terribly good at it, but the few times I had gone out to bounce off trees and ramps, I'd had the fucking time of my life.

Now, I was in Tokyo. On a strict fitness regime that focused mainly on movement.

Basically, so long as I didn't intrude on private property or abuse my Quirk in broad daylight, I was still young enough to get away with pretty much anything. And hey, there were no laws dictating _how_ people had to get around.

Well, I mean, there _were_ , but shut up.

The professional hero that was covering me didn't seem to mind all too much. He was tall, from the brief glimpses I could get of him whenever he came into view; tall, thin, and wearing a hood and mask combination that did wonders to keep his identity under wraps. Unlike a lot of the other people who didn't even bother with the Clark Kent style glasses, this one seemed to genuinely care about his secret civilian persona.

I did occasionally see blue flashes of light coming from where I knew he was hiding away, watching me from the rooftops. No clue what they were, but they looked pretty cool from ground level.

The important part was that he wasn't telling me to stop bouncing off the trees and whatever else Tokyo had to offer me in their streets, so he was alright in my book. It would have been nice to know _who_ he was, given the frustrating mystery surrounding the circumstances for _why_ he was here, but that was hardly my secret to know.

The main point was that running through Tokyo was fun, and I lacked enough self-preservation instincts to really take it to the next level. It was also a good explanation for why I decided to vault over the fence once I got to school, instead of using the boring front gate.

My school had a very vault-able fence. Unlike the lame expanses of the preschool I'd been forced into at an early age, this one was like a thrill-seeker's training wheels. The tiny playgrounds were perfect for practicing my death defying flips.

The amount of times I've seen older kids trying to replicate my moves, only to end up eating the dirt/bark blend of the playground floor… Their cries were music to my ears. Sip shit, little Timmy-san, your supersonic scream Quirk can't help you here. This is _my_ domain.

Diving over the fence as though I were entering a pool, I hit the ground in a roll, leaving behind a trail of my hair as it impacted. Beanies were against the school's policy, for what little that really mattered to me, but I usually kept my hair out in the open whenever the street could see my uniform. The place had been nice enough to accept me even when I had to enroll myself, and this was _after_ my extensive history of violence.

Shouji wasn't going to arrive for a while yet. Today was a Thursday, which meant his father would be driving him in. I still didn't know exactly what his parents did - the brief glimpses that constituted basically all I knew of them painted a very basic picture indeed - only that it kept them occupied throughout most of the week, and I wasn't typically lonely enough to insist Shouji catch the train and cut whatever time he could spend with at least one parent short.

It was only a half hour, which over the last two years, I'd learned to deal with quite efficiently. I made my way to our usual hangout, a brick wall with a garden on one side and a line of classrooms on the other, and pulled out my phone to wait.

It occurs to me that you might have been wondering what I had been doing over the last couple of years. Oddly enough, as the silence on the topic would indicate… nothing of significance had really happened.

The life of a child was generally a dull one. There would always be the occasional exceptions, like those little brats that got to travel the world and see all the sights, and you could probably guess that I wasn't really one of them. Hell, if I could help it, most days I wouldn't even leave the house if it wasn't necessary.

I had more important things to do with my time than play outside. When I wasn't training my ass off under Aizawa on the days he wasn't around, I was either writing or hunting through the back alleys of the internet, trying to figure out what had survived the emergence of Quirks and what hadn't.

Honestly, there really wasn't much to go off. The search engines were all different. The streaming services somehow felt even more incompetent, mostly having layouts that were confusing at best and unworkable at worst. A lot of the other major websites didn't even have copies, having been wiped so thoroughly from the internet that even the few archival algorithms I could access couldn't pick up a trace of them. Hell if I knew what any of it meant, but it was an interesting bit of knowledge.

Hey, don't look at me like that. I'm a fiction author, not an investigative journalist. Anything could have happened in the few hundred years I'd not been around.

But hey, somehow we still had Twitter. Nobody used it anymore and the last trademark I could find anywhere for it was about a hundred and seventy-three years old, but that just meant that it was back on the market and for a price that was astoundingly within my budget.

The internet was a wild place in the future. I was very thankful for the thick cloud that must have floated in front of the sun if I could see my phone screen this well. The process of adding purple balls to the top of a purple bird logo was going swimmingly due to that, and my concentration only broke when Shouji's car rolled up.

It was a bit of a rarity, and it still brought a smile to my lips when I even thought about it. A truck, with the back always loaded down with tools, stark white in colour and still somehow operating perfectly well on electricity. It was a far cry from the tiny, sad pieces that usually littered the Tokyo streets. Were they economical and environmentally friendly? Yes. Were they respectable in any capacity? Pfft, no.

Even without the roar of an old-fashioned engine and the stink of fuel in the air, the part of me that was still living in rural Australia circa-2019 appreciated it. There was enough growl inside of it to suggest a custom job, which was also the main reason I could identify it by sound alone.

I glanced up, more than ready to tell Shouji off for the English homework he'd doubtlessly forgotten to do, and almost fell off my perch when I realised that it wasn't a cloud that was blocking the sun out. Aizawa would have my head if he ever heard that I'd ever allowed someone to sneak up on me, especially one as… noticeable as this one.

It would have been more accurate to describe him as a wraith, rather than a man. His face was barely a step above skeletal, eyes sunken and a green mist rising from his mouth. He towered over me; even taking into account the fact that I was sitting on the ground, an eyeball estimate told me that he would have to stoop if he wanted to enter any of the classrooms through their doors. Doors which the school's website boasted had been designed with enlargement Quirks in mind.

I stared up at him, feeling very much like a deer in the headlights as I met his gaze. He'd been looking at me first, I realised; even though he was standing close enough to _blot out the fucking sun_ with his body, he took another step towards me.

He was so thin. Way too thin. His biceps were about as thick as my wrists, and the rest of his body was proportional. The only thing on him that was wide was his grin. He looked like he was trying to imitate the smile that had made All Might an international sensation, and was just really fucking bad at it.

Oh dear, this was how it was going to end. I should have listened to myself when I said I was too pretty for public school.

Nuh uh, fuck this.

He took one step towards me and stooped down before I reacted, coming to a stop close enough for me to smell his breath. The noxious odour was just that; noxious. He stank of chemicals, which only seemed to alleviate itself after I pulled my head out of the green cloud that was growing to surround me.

Throwing the famous Japanese decorum to the wayside, I rolled away, coming to my feet with one hand over my nose and the other waving rapidly through the air. I felt like I was going to throw up, or perhaps pass out, neither of which seemed like a desirable or even safe option right now.

People, the kids around me, were pointing and whispering. For all I knew, the guy was related to one of them, but I wasn't about to stick around and find out.

"Dude!" I choked out the word while I backed away, being sure to keep him in my sights as I moved. He seemed to heave a breath as I spoke to him for the first time, and the green mist coming out of his nostrils along with his mouth almost made me cackle. He looked like a cartoon bull, and it would have been hilarious if I wasn't already convinced that he'd driven here in a white van.

"Brush your fucking teeth!" My outburst had caught the attention of the staff; I could see a teacher from the older classes making her way over. I chose that moment to make my escape, purposefully stepping aside so that his eerie stare would fall on her.

He froze, eyes widening, his eyes losing the laser focus they'd had on me. I was gone before he could take another cloudy breath, ducking around the brick wall I'd been leaning against and almost sprinting towards where Shouji was climbing out of his car.

I slammed the brakes on before he saw me, bringing my phone back underneath my nose to perfect the nonchalant act I'd decided on. It might have been a side-effect of his Quirk or the difficulties I'd been trying to help him through, but Shouji always seemed somewhat twitchy. That hyper-awareness wouldn't be helped any by my paranoia.

Just because the guy had looked like a creeper, that didn't mean he necessarily was one. That may have just been part of his Quirk, but to fair to myself, I was judging him based on his actions, not his biology.

Meh, not my problem anymore.

"Shouji!" I slammed through the crowd coming into the gates with all the subtlety of a freight train, for that was the only way anybody would have ever gotten through. Say what you will about children, but the walls they could make with their bodies alone could be impenetrable.

...Shit, I should not be making jokes like that while a potential crazy was on campus.

The car was already pulling away by the time I was close enough to tap my large friend on the shoulder. Even if it wasn't the same type of model, the unfailing Japanese manners meant that parents wouldn't be spending too much time parked where they could clog traffic. Just to be sure, I waved towards the car with my other hand, being sure to shoot a quick grin after it. No reason to be rude to someone who didn't deserve it, after all.

Shouji glanced down at me, face half hidden and eyebrows raised. I grinned back up at him, raising my phone to show off the amazing investment that I'd just made. My hope was that it would soften the blow after I finally grew a pair and told him that he couldn't copy from my homework any longer.

That hope was decidedly dashed when a massive explosion went off behind me.

 **XxX**

For a brief, horrifying moment, I was worried that I'd been knocked out.

Heat washed over me in a roiling wave. The oppressive wave of force pushed me forward, and would have flattened me against the floor had Shouji not caught me. He did that a lot, it seemed.

My head felt fuzzy. I couldn't quite _hear_ the screaming around me, but logic and reason told me that it was there.

And then, like a bubble bursting, everything came rushing right back to reality.

The noise was deafening. Children and adults alike were panicking, raising a cacophony that almost managed to drown out the sound of a second detonation. I pushed myself away from Shouji, balancing on unsteady feet with ease that had taken years to cultivate.

My hand strayed up to my hair. Fuck the laws, I could deal with them later. With a lump of hair gripped beneath white knuckles, I turned around, staring out over the frenzied crowd at who I _knew_ was responsible.

He stood out like a beacon, thin form unwavering in the chaos that surrounded us. Sparks danced across his teeth as he shifted his jaw, before he reared back and spat a small, flaming blob of mucus at the huddled form at his feet.

I was moving before I had time to really think about it. Every single thing Aizawa had ever taught me ran through my head, submissions and tactics and maneuvers lost in a blur of panicked movement. The hand holding my hair shot out, nothing but a thought and a prayer guiding all the strength I could muster.

Humanity had evolved pretty far since the last time I was alive. All the strength I could muster, even at the age of seven and a half, came out to be somewhat similar to a cannonball.

My hair caught the spittle halfway through its descent, detonating it early and turning into a ball of harmless flames. The man turned his head, following the altered trajectory of the ball for a split second, and that was all the time I needed.

Aizawa's fighting style wasn't very unique. Granted, ambush tactics weren't typically favoured by heroes who played to the cameras (read, the heroes that everyone always saw), but they were the bread and butter of the underground war on crime. Fortunately for everyone involved in this situation, aside from the beanstalk asshole that had caused it, I was pretty much nocturnal in all but schedule.

A sphere of hair on the ground at my feet launched me up. The angle was perfect; of course the angle was perfect. This was _my_ Quirk, _my_ superpower, and I was going to milk it for all it was worth. I went up and over the devastation, trying not to think too much about just how terrible everything looked, and came down upon old exploverbite like a slightly less intimidating bird of prey.

Symphonies could be sung about the moment of impact. My options were limited by my entrance, in both offense and defense. Had I been lower, my immediate response would have been a boot to the dick. Safe, effective, lower chance of the dipshit contaminating the gene pool later.

Instead, I had to twist myself through the air, and put everything I had into a single swing of my leg.

Thankfully, the school didn't have any dress code when it came to footwear. With the rise of drastically dissimilar body types, that was to be expected. It also meant that instead of some pathetic strip of leather aiding my assault, I instead had a pair of boots that probably each weighed about as much as the leg they were attached to. Even after centuries, the rural Australian expanses hadn't left me entirely. Honestly, I should have been thankful that they hadn't.

The man must have seen me coming at the last possible second. There was no chance that he would have been able to move his skinny little ass out of the way in time, but unfortunately for him, his brain made the absolute worst decision available to it in that moment.

He turned towards me, just in time to catch a gravity-boosted hammer kick to the TNTeeth.

I _felt_ his jaw disconnecting even before he screamed in pain. He fell back, droplets of blood and chipped pieces of teeth following in his wake. I followed him down, correcting myself in mid-air so I would land on my feet- and accidentally slammed one boot down with impunity onto the _entirety_ of his crotch.

Let me tell you, adrenaline is one hell of a drug. If I wasn't riding high off my ass on danger juice, I probably would have lost my breakfast in a laughing fit, no matter how many children had been blown up. The way his eyes shot open and he hunched over, going from lying flat on his back to cradling himself in a split second… oh, fuck, priceless.

However, funny as that was to witness, I still had a job to do. Like the proper saviour of the people I was, instead of letting everyone die because I accidentally stomped this man's family line out of existence, I crawled around him like a deformed spider, and locked my arms around his neck in a chokehold.

No, wait, this was more like a hug. Just give me a second to reposition the elbow- and _there's_ the asphyxiation I was promised!

Man, was a shitty day this guy was having. He'd probably rolled out of bed, all giddy because today was the day he was finally gonna kill a whole bunch of kids. Now here he was, getting choked out by some child about half his height. And just add insult to injury, his dick probably didn't work anymore.

What a time to be alive- why was he turning to face me?

The man stared at me for a moment with a single eye. All I could see within his soul was smouldering rage. I tried to squeeze harder, with my big beefy grade-schooler arms, but it quickly became clear to me that he didn't have anything left to live for.

A green cloud erupted out of his mouth. Sitting this close to him, willingly this time, I could actually discern its putrid scent. I would stake my reputation as a connoisseur of trash that I was smelling a mixture of ammonia and morning breath. What I wouldn't have been able to tell you is which one was honestly worse to be near.

Undeterred, I stared him down. He really was a hideous creature, now that I was taking the time to notice. All sharp edges and unfortunate implications. One of his hands clamped down over my arms, securing them in a surprisingly strong grip.

I took that to mean that my impromptu plan was working. That is, until he breathed out once more, so much so that the green cloud had almost entirely covered us, and raised his other hand.

Aizawa was so going to have my head when he found out that I couldn't even choke a dude out. Man, how embarrassi-

 _Click_

My entire brain stalled for a moment. In what could have been a rare instance of the world itself moving in slow motion, I glanced over his shoulder, squinting through the emerald haze to identify what the man was holding.

A small, simple lighter. The kind that someone would use to light their cigarette- _OH FUCKNUGGETS._

I stared at the man.

The man stared at me.

The ironclad grip he had on my arm tightened even further.

 _Click_

 _Fwoom_

Well shit.

 _ **BOOOOOM!**_


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: Stayed up until almost 3 in the morning writing this.**

 ***zombie noises***

* * *

Whoever said that your life flashed before your eyes when you died was potentially a massive liar. If I'd had the time to rewatch my boring existence, then I would have had the time to figure my way out of my massive predicament.

It was my fault, absolutely. My life had been in my own hands and I'd overlooked an obviously major factor in my possible survival. Great big adult with responsibilities and what could have been a job I may have been, but I was also stuck in the body of a preteen.

Even if I'd come close to killing myself a few times with training in order to survive in this deceptively shitty world, having better reflexes or faster ground speeds didn't mean shit when the other guy could get one hand on you and then blow the fuck up.

Had I gotten cocky? Nah, I wouldn't say so. Cockiness would imply confidence, and confidence would imply that I'd even had time to think through the implications of what I'd done. I'd saved the teacher for a moment, whoever she even was, but the most my interceptions would have otherwise accomplished was maybe buy enough time for everyone else to get just a little bit further away.

Maybe that would matter, and maybe this happening today was inevitable. If only I hadn't moved without thinking. If only I'd had the time to think.

Looking back, I really could have grabbed his head and given it all the torque my little blood soaked hands could generate. It would have come with a whole new set of problems after the fact, assuming it worked at all, and I couldn't help but be just a little bit glad that my immediate reaction wasn't cold-blooded murder.

For all five seconds it would last. I wonder what the next life would have in store?

I didn't really see anything of grand design or significant impact through my mind as that spark caught and lit us both up. I could have said that time seemed to remain slow, that the utter dread I'd been feeling was enough to make this moment seem like it had lasted forever, but that was far from the truth.

There wasn't really any dread. There was embarrassment, sure, that I'd completely forgotten to confiscate any potential weaponry when I should have _known_ that I wouldn't have the power to immobilise my enemy. There was fear, but that was mainly for the lives of everyone else around me. The actual children, those who hadn't already lived and learned.

They would be safe. They'd have to be. I'd had a hero following me since I got to this country, and even if they couldn't help my dumb ass out of this predicament, everyone else would be fine.

It was kind of a chilling realisation to find out that I was probably going to die. And that's okay. At the very least, this would give Shouji his amazingly tragic background story that every prolific hero needed.

Hahaha… Shit, I hope he could forgive me for this.

Getting free was impossible, given my time frame. Tanking an explosion when I was in the middle of its catalyst would probably be a bit out of my limits of endurance. Opening my mouth and allowing some of the gas to get into my lungs would be a monumentally bad idea, but so was tackling the living bomb.

I don't know how I had the opportunity, but when I took my final breath, I inhaled a bit more than necessary and threw my head back.

"BRING IT, FUCKER!"

The cry rang out over the screaming of the students around us. It beat the sirens out for sheer volume and drowned out panicked howling that was coming from all six of Shouji's arms. I closed my eyes, face scrunched up in preparation for the heat and the dark abyss on the other side.

Flames washed over me. I could feel them as they burned at my clothing, blasting the detachable hair from my head and chilling me to the bone- wait what?

Cautiously, I cracked a single eye open, tilting it down when it wasn't immediately burned right out of my skull. The hand clamped around my arm was still there, but now the wrist it had been connected to was pointing in the opposite direction of the elbow is was attached to. Blue flamed billowed around the man's entire body, hiding everything from view but the twitching of his clearly dislocated shoulder.

He was trying to scream, I think. It was hard to tell, because there was a very heavy boot digging directly into his jaw, pressing into the toxic bruise that I'd left behind.

I scrambled away, patting myself absently to assure myself that yes, I absolutely was still alive. The boot holding the bomber down lifted slightly, letting the man take a short breath before it dropped, the impact leaving cracks in the cement around him.

I followed the boot up a long leg, over a dark jacket, and up at the chin of the man who had just saved my life. The rest of his face was covered in an obsidian mask, leaving only enough room for piercing turquoise eyes to level a malicious glare down at my would-be murderer.

This was my babysitter for that morning, I could see that soon enough. The blue fire dancing along his body was a dead giveaway. Even so, he looked familiar. Like I should have known who he was, or at least had an idea.

Someone behind me groaned, the noise barely loud enough to be heard over the crackling flame. In that moment, I remembered where I was and what had happened. There were others around me. There were people _dying_.

The hero was forgotten as I spun around, assessing the situation as best I could. I didn't have much, only knowledge that was given to me about ten years ago and may have been a few centuries out of date, but what else was there?

It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, to be honest. There were injuries, yes, but much of the scorch marks seemed to just stop at a certain point. Streaks spread out from both edges, true, but the people who had been near them had gotten away with little more than burns.

Of course, there had been someone who had taken the majority of the blast.

I could barely recognise the teacher that had initially approached when I'd fled the man. The most I could see was that her hair was pink. I would have to wait until later to figure out if it was natural or not, because I'd found where all the devastation to the environment had gone. Her limbs were charred, most of her face was covered in ash, and I could see she wasn't breathing because most of her chest was exposed.

I shrugged off my uniform top and draped it over her, partly to cover her modesty, but mostly so I wouldn't slip. Footsteps were rushing over to me as I settled on my knees and locked my hands over her sternum; I could tell it was Shouji, given how his arms threw off his gait.

I had the time to breathe into her mouth twice before he reached us. Both times her chest rose and fell, before she was completely still again. Fuck.

Blood loss, blood loss… a lot, but not enough to risk brain death. Maybe, possibly, but what choice did I have?

"Min-!" He froze, the rest of my name coming out as a short gasp. I rolled my shoulders before locking them into position, leaning my weight onto my arms and glancing up at him for a split second.

"You'll need to tell me when she has a pulse, I can't stop."

Shouji would come through. I knew I could trust him, even with this. I got to compression three before I could see him sitting beside me and crossing his legs, one of his arms morphing into an ear and the other five doing who knows what outside my vision.

"Ambulance sirens a few blocks away," He told me by compression twenty-seven. All I could do was grunt.

The second set of rescue breaths came and went. I almost faltered when I saw her eyelid flicker after the second one, but the moment was short-lived and there was no movement afterwards.

A loud crack echoed out of her chest as I counted past nineteen once more. The arm Shouji was holding over her flinched, and I nearly did too.

"That was a rib." One of his other arms told me, the words feeling oppressive in their volume even though they had been dan near whispered directly into my ear.

"Can't stop," was my short reply.

I couldn't tell you how long I was kneeling there, trying to bring some life back into the woman that I'd almost unknowingly sacrificed. The eternal moments I'd spent locked in that madman's embrace couldn't hold a candle to the marathon that I was participating in now. I think I honestly would have preferred to be locked in his grip again, if it meant that this hadn't needed to happen.

I fought back, just for a moment, when someone began tugging me away. The two hands on my shoulders were immediately joined by another pair, which was the only thing that calmed me down. Shouji tugged me backwards and I blinked, my vision suddenly filling with things other than my bloodstained shirt and hands and my brain snapping out of the continuous loop to thirty that I'd trapped it within.

She was lifted onto a stretcher, ferried away by people with Quirks far more suitable to the situation than mine could ever be. I folded my arms up in my ruined shirt, the cold sting of defeat curling up in my gut, and was about to turn around when a girl about my age was led towards the ambulance by the hand.

Her hair was identical to the teacher, in both colour and odd style. Her eyes were swamped with tears, but as she turned to look at me, even between the distance between us, I could see the crosshairs within her irises unerringly focus directly onto me.

'I'm sorry,' I mouthed at her, because I knew she would see it. She seemed surprised, pausing for a moment, but it was enough time for her to shoot me a watery smile before she was ushered into the cabin of the vehicle.

There were more than a few cars parked outside of the school. A lot more ambulances took up space wherever they could fit. Policemen were out in droves, clearing room as more children were shepherded through the front gate and towards the army of paramedics.

I tugged weakly against my restraints as Shouji led me directly to one of the ambulances. It didn't matter that the woman who wrapped a blanket around my shoulders greeted him with a tight hug. It didn't feel like I needed the treatment as she shot me an intimidating grin and checked my temperature with her third arm.

There was not a number in the world small enough to accurately showcase how little Shouji cared for my protests as he bodily pulled me into the back of the ambulance. He still had three arms wrapped around me as we sat hip-to-hip on the bed, his grip maybe just a little too tight and my hands shaking just a little too much to try to adjust it.

Bless that boy.

 **XxX**

" _-...i, who was patrolling the area on the second year of his provisional licence, was quick to step in. Thanks to the intervention of one of the school's own students, only one person was critically injured in the initial blast…"_

I wish I could turn that damn thing off.

Hospital chairs were never comfortable. It didn't matter how much padding you packed under your ass, if the armrests were heated and a personal masseur was working the kinks out of your shoulders while you waited. And I didn't even have the latter two things to help me through this.

I hadn't needed any attention beyond the simple check-up I got in the ambulance ride over. The guy'd had enough grip strength to leave some welts behind on my arms, but that was thankfully all that had happened. My attack had been too sudden and brutal for him to get any real damage in.

Between my assault and the finisher from the Pro that had been there, I had my doubts he'd ever be able to talk again. The vindictive glee I felt was probably a little much, but after all was said and done, I was glad to have left that mark behind.

Not for myself, of course. I didn't give a shit about that. It was all for the little girl that had claimed the seat beside mine, her legs drawn up to her chin and her eyes glued to the television.

I looked up at it too, just in time to watch an outsider perspective of the event as it happened. The camera had shifted from a couple of girls who would have been a few years levels above me, one of them doing their best to hold a wobbly smile, while the other waited impatiently for a camera flash that would never happen. It was easy to chuckle at that; Even after all this time, some of the classics survived.

Witnessing that blast from their point of view was terrifying. The area behind them lit up, and a few seconds of blurring colours and panicked shouts reigned. The camera was righted after concrete had turned to grass, and the girl's friend could be heard shouting at her as she skidded to a stop and turned her phone back towards the scene.

She got there just in time for my hair to catch the flaming glob of mucus. The camera shook again, people cried out, and then there I was, arcing through the air towards my victim.

And looking like a fucking fool while doing so.

The real reason I'd had enough momentum to actually do some damage with that kick was because I was tumbling over the pavement like a leaf in a hurricane. It seemed that only the grace of god and anime logic had allowed me to live through the day.

That chokehold was textbook, though. I could be proud of that attempted submission. Even if my shrimpy little t-rex arms didn't do the job properly.

Dropping a stomp from a full two metres right onto his baby maker was just an added bonus. I hope, for the rest of his miserable life, whenever he looked down there, he would think of me.

...OH FUCK WAIT NO-

The screen flared blue, replacing the horrid cries with crackling flames. I turned away from the burning light, tilting my head towards the ground as the screen broke off into static and the screaming finally stopped.

" _...That footage, captured just this morning, shows the terrifying moment when a villain attack starts. No news has reached yet as to who this man even is, or whether he is a resident of our country. Police are still-"_

The television flickered off suddenly, a low, metallic whine echoing out of the speakers as its inner workings began to cool. Small movement caught the corner of my eye, and I turned just in time to Shouji taking the seat directly beside mine.

His father took the one on the other side of Mei, the remote held within one enormous hand.

"That's nothing a kid should be watching." Despite his gruff tone, the grin he sent my way was all friendly. "You doin' alright?"

I sagged in my seat, wishing I could run a hand through my hair without taking half of it with me. Without the constant drone of the television, the room we were sitting in was eerily quiet.

"Honestly, I think one of the nurses sedated me." And for good reason, too. I hadn't really been able to stop shaking once it sunk in just how close I had been to dying. It was the kind of thing that hit you much harder after the fact, considering there wasn't supposed to _be_ an after the fact.

The man laughed, ruffling my hair; absentmindedly swatting away the spheres that had gotten stuck to his hand. "Yeah, they do that."

Maybe I would have tried to smile back at him, if I wasn't tripping. As it was, our current environment wasn't very conducive to cheer, no matter how false it may have been.

After a moment, Shouji patted me on the arm and hopped out of his chair. I did manage a smile as he moved around me and climbed into his father's lap, his shoulders even more stiff than mine. A glance towards Mei proved that she was an unresponsive as before, so with a sigh I settled back in my chair, picking at the dried blood on my arm as I awaited news about the woman that I'd left to die.

One of the receptionists had told me that Katsushika was notified on my presence the moment I came through the door. Apparently he'd promised to bring some fresh clothes when he came to pick me up. Technically I wasn't really supposed to be sitting there, but with Shouji's father being relegated to keeping an eye on Mei and Katsushika being Katsushika, well… let's just say I wasn't expecting to be able to change any time soon.

Time passed by at a crawl. With nothing left to occupy my time, I pulled out my phone, checking over my bank account as quickly as the horrible reception in the building allowed. I would be able to cover any medical fees if it came to that; being published with another book in the works was good for that, after all, but that was a secret and the mysterious novelist 'M.M' had nothing to do with me beyond a few odd coincidences.

If the world was a kinder place, I probably would have laughed over the fact that people considered my historical comedy set in pre-Quirk society as a horror. Take that, add in some aliens and philosophical musings on the limits of reality and fiction, and people were hooked.

International bestseller, or so I'd been told. I closed down all the unnecessary apps with a few swipes of my finger, opened up some unfinished notes, and quietly began work on the sequel.

On my phone. In a hospital waiting room.

Maybe this _was_ a horror story.

Nobody was in a chatty mood for the next handful of minutes. Shouji's father left to use the bathroom, and silently played the part of despair well enough to get a small smile out of his son when Shouji refused to give the seat back. Mei sniffed a few times, and somewhere along the line I went from writing down ideas as they occurred to me to angling my phone so we could all watch silly cat videos.

We were about a third of the way through a lacklustre prank compilation, which I was only stomaching because it was getting laughs from Shouji and Mei, when a doctor I didn't recognise walked into the room. He cleared his throat, staring pointedly in our direction, and Shouji's father untangled himself from the uncomfortable positions we'd all settled in to stand up.

"Mrs Hatsume's next of kin?" The doctor moved to look at Mei at the same time Shouji's father stepped in front of her.

"Her husband is still an hour away and I have permission to inform him of anything that happens." Even though I could only hear the frown in his voice, I had to feel sorry for that doctor. Shouji's father (I really would need to learn his name sometime soon) had been all smiles with us up until that point, but he was still a man who was built like a two-story house. I couldn't tell if it was his Quirk or just the way he was, but the guy looked like he could actually, _literally_ eat me.

I think I would have rather picked a fight with a bear. They were about the same size, but at least there was a slim chance that I was smarter than a bear.

It was an apt comparison, now that I actually thought about it. Both were protecting cubs.

The doctor stilled looked hesitant, not that I could blame him. It was common knowledge that villain attacks weren't just about injuries. Everyone, even (most) villains had friends, and about 80% of the population had a means of attacking someone if the mood struck them and the victim had given away enough information.

It was a ridiculous policy that didn't really help matters much and only really could be enforced in public clinics, but it was common enough to be a regular plot point on the medical dramas that I would sometimes sit through if there was nothing else to watch.

I get bored easily, okay?

Of course, blowing up a school didn't really count as discrete, and the doctor didn't take very long to realise that. He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses, gave the clipboard in his hands one last glance, and then returned his attention to Shouji's father with a small smile.

"She's expected to make a full recovery."

I slumped back into my seat like a puppet with slit strings, a relieved laugh bubbling up out of my throat. Something latched onto my hand, and it took me a few moments to realise that Mei had clamped onto it in a fit of joy. At least I think the dance she was doing in her seat was supposed to be joy.

"We're unsure if it's a hereto-unknown aspect of her Quirk, but it appears her heart managed to beat long enough for the paramedics to stabilise her." From the corner of my eye, I could see one of Shouji's arms morph into a mouth. Thinking quickly, I shot a hand out and nudged his shoulder, shaking my head in the negative when he turned inquisitive eyes on me. I knew exactly what he was about to say, and I had a fair idea of how it would go if something like _that_ was released to the public. "It will take some time, but all her injuries are expected to heal."

The miracles of modern medicine. Though, saying "there's a Quirk for that" was hardly an advancement for any particular discipline. Whatever, I wasn't about to complain about that when there were so many other things I could complain about.

For example; my fucking school just got blown up. My teacher and fellow students too, but they would probably be okay. Still, school was literally the only thing that got me out of the house beyond my own backyard, so that was pretty shitty.

Questions would have to be answered, but for now, I wasn't in any position to even ask them. While I probably could have figured out exactly who that hero on duty was, there was no guarantee that I would be able to get into contact with him. Yamada was a definite no-go, and Aizawa was a coin flip at best.

Even so, why? Was it a random attack? I know I'd been reborn as Mineta and everything, but was I truly _that_ unlucky? No, I didn't think so. Not when the man had walked up to me in particular. Not when I was forced to be under constant supervision from people who could fight.

Mei's father sprinted through the emergency room sliding doors forty minutes later. I'd spent all that time in quiet contemplation, ignoring any attempts to lure me into conversation. I was too busy trying to find clues that I could string together, trying to make any sense of this situation.

Shouji's father ended up driving me home.

Katsushiki never bothered showing up.

 **XxX**

I always thought the corkboard, thumb tack, and string combination was a tired joke. A cliche for insane characters to showcase that they're insane. As I stood in front of my corkboard, looping another piece of string between two thumb tacks, I couldn't help but feel that there was a bit too much truth in television for my comfort.

My head felt like it was spinning in an endless circle. All of this made sense in the most nonsensical of ways. Elite guards are following me around, my school gets attacked, I was the one the guy initially approached… and then nothing. No clues, no interesting little shred of evidence in the police reports that I perused through _totally_ legal means (shut up), and no form of follow-up ever since.

Explodo McFuckface stared at me from the corkboard, his blank eyes carving a divot into my soul. I stared right back at him, my head cocked to the side, in a fruitless attempt to come to any conclusion other than, 'this is a mugshot.'

He wasn't alone up there. I had pictures of Mineta as a baby, somewhat obstructing the few shots I'd managed to scrounge up of what I'd looked like in my first life. Beside those was a picture of every conceivable angle of the building housing the less than legal surgical facility that had saved me from a tortured existence of being two feet tall, along with a transcription of the conversation I'd had in order to set up the appointment.

I'd forgotten that part of the deception was claiming I was just an unfortunately short twenty-something. It wasn't like that was a lie, it just wasn't the entire truth.

Gaslight ChildPopper the Third wasn't telling me shit. I gazed into his dead, photograph eyes for a moment longer before shaking my head and sighing in disgust. The man had no weaknesses, my techniques weren't working. I ran my hand through my hair, shaking the balls off my fingers afterwards. I needed a new angle.

I tore the edge of the photo slightly as I ripped it off the wall and flung it somewhere towards the corner of the room. The crazed-sounding muttering I was doing under my breath didn't really help alleviate the 'insane' appearance any, but I had more important things to worry about.

Like stringing up a picture of my school in the space where Fugly's head had once been.

Enjoy getting diddled in prison, dipshit.  
The door behind me slowly creaked open, flooding half the room in light. I paid it no mind, instead choosing to keep focusing on the board. Hizashi was out buying groceries, which meant that Aizawa was both alone in guarding me and more aware than ever, given the lack of backup. Trusting him to know when it would be alright to interrupt me, I grabbed at another piece of string-

Two tiny hands wrapped around arm. I froze, glancing down at them in utter bewilderment, and didn't even get a chance to turn around before the talking started.

"Ohmygosh why didn't you tell me Shouji toldmewhatyou did I was so scared why didn't you tell me that youguysweretheones that saved mama!"

I turned around, and sure enough, there was a head of pink hair tucked into my side. Cross-haired pupils stared up at me, and if I didn't know any better, I would have sworn that there were tiny stars dancing with them.

There was no point trying to unpack the massive jumble of words that had tumbled out of her mouth. Instead, I sighed, tried to untangle my arm from Mei's grip, and gave up once it became apparent that she wasn't about to let go without a fight.

"How did you get in my house?" Opting to go for the simple route of easy questions, I turned back to finally apply that little bit of string, that would connect my school to an underground smuggling ring that had been busted a little over a century ago- and immediately dropped it when my shoulder was almost yanked out of its socket.

"The sleepy man let me in!" The power this child wielded was immense. The corkboard soon became a distant memory as I was tugged out of the room, and even the amused expression on Aizawa's face had to take a back seat as I was dragged through my own house by a girl I'd never had a conversation with. "Wanna see what I'm working on!?"

Being almost a full head taller than her had its disadvantages, such as when we took the corner into the kitchen at speed and I was almost brained on one of the cabinets. Resigned to my fate, I quickly dislodged the sphere of hair holding my spool of string, just barely managing to leave it on the counter before I was pulled through the back door.

I wasn't exactly sure what was happening or how it had come to be, but the fact that my body had automatically gone mostly limp during the journey to my backyard in order to minimize the damage spoke wonders. Shouji was already there, laughing at my predicament. I didn't know what the eccentric goggles he was wearing were supposed to do, but something told me I was about to find out.

As Mei dove for the goggles and let go of my arm a little too late, I pondered my fate just a little bit more. This was an interesting hole I'd found myself trapped in; I didn't know how deep it was or if I was even falling at the moment. I didn't even know which life I had to worry about more.

Those thought left me, along with all the air in my lungs, when Mei came crashing down upon me. The goggles on her head and the massive wrench in her hand must have come close to doubling her weight, and all of that was now resting on my sternum as she fiddled with her strange invention. She seemed comfortable, sprawled out on her stomach, but at least her shifting around every few moments gave me a chance to breathe.

Shouji laughed again, happy and carefree, and maybe knowing he could still make a noise like that turned the pained wheeze I let out afterwards into a strained chuckle. He didn't seem worried, not anymore, and maybe that was a bit more reassuring than it should have been.

Buuuut… Guess I didn't have a choice, I would just have to figure this all out another day.


End file.
